A knitter in the prime of life who knits to network TV

January 06, 2013

There are mistakes that make you feel like a fool, and there
are mistakes that make you feel like a fool but teach you something.

I’ve now picked out the rows with the wrong yarn dominance
on Mara’s sleeve, and I’m back on track with the sleeve knitting. This was a mistake that made me feel like a
fool and taught me nothing. Well, not
exactly nothing. It should have taught me
to read my notes, but I know this kind of error will persist as long as I can
hold a pair of knitting needles. I
suppose it is the knitting gods way of keeping me from getting too big for my
britches.

There was another mistake a while back that did teach me
something about fixing errors in stranded knitting. Despite the care I had taken to check my work
each night and the following morning, slapping myself on the back for achieving
near perfection, I spotted a stitch that was the wrong color:

How could I have made such a mistake and missed it entirely? How could I have knit so many rows before noticing?
I suppose everything I know from watching cop shows on TV is right: Eyewitness
accounts aren’t reliable.

This error was in the center back, and so I imagined people
staring at it behind my back, where it would act as a beacon attracting their
attention. The morning after the
discovery, I played the “can-you-find-the-mistake?” game with DH. He responded with a “no-not-again” look on
his face, and he said he couldn’t find it—but he always says that. Or what’s
worse, he will point to something that is perfectly fine on my knitting and
suggest that I rip, just to keep me in practice. DS was also given this test on Mara’s back
and he stared blankly at the knitting, unable to figure out what I was so
insistent was a glaring mistake.

I appear to have split the plies on the salmon yarn, and
knit it instead of the red. I’m guessing
that when I measured my work, a few stitches fell off the needle, and I didn’t
put them back carefully. But I could not leave this as is.

My first response was to do the knitting equivalent of
sweeping it under the rug—duplicate stitch.
And this did work to disguise the errant stitch when I tried it. But
that didn’t really make me happy because the mistake would always be
there. I wondered about dropping down
stitches to fix the mistake, just as I would for one color knitting. But this raised the specter of having to tink
back dozens of rows should the operation go awry.

I spent some time searching to see if there were any
bloggers who fixed dropped stitches in stranded knitting, and there were a few
encouraging bits of advice. So I decided
to practice on my swatch by deliberately dropping a stitch and then picking it
up. If it didn’t work, I’d only have a
messed-up swatch.

It turns out that dropping stitches in stranded knitting is not as horrible as it might seem. The yarn is sticky, and you have to pick out the stitches above the mistake with some force. This is what a column of intentionally dropped stitches is like.

After practicing, I marked the row I wanted to drop on Mara’s
back.

Using a crochet hook and some care, I was able to knit the stitch in red and then pick up the stitches over the correction.

When blocked, this fix will be invisible. It is only a bit more difficult than duplicate stitch, and
it gives a much better result.

April 05, 2010

In January, when I began my year-long foray into the realm
of two-color knitting, I thought I’d have an opinion about stranding vs.
weaving in, favoring one over the other.All I can say now if someone were to ask me which I prefer is, “it
depends”.As far as I can determine,
the yarn, the project, and the look of the finished sweater ought to dictate
the choice.And so starting a new
two-color project will always require a decision and, possibly, swatches
knitted both ways.

After my decision to frog and reknit Sirdal, I thought I
could correct the unpleasant showing through of the contrast yarn by using
modestly long floats rather than weaving those floats.And at that point, I thought I was
firmly in the stranding camp.The part
of Sirdal that I’ve reknit looks much better stranded.

The sweater I intended to knit after Sirdal was Colour Your
Own, a Philosopher’s Wool kit.Not
surprisingly, there’s a Philosopher’s Wool group on Ravelry.I discovered last month that it was
starting a KAL beginning in April, and I thought I’d enjoy the camaraderie and
support of other knitters. I also thought that a good objective for the next
few months (until about June) would be to finish two stranded projects.Just thinking about having warm
sweaters on my lap during my nightly sessions in July and August is making me sweat.So for the summer, I expect to switch
temporarily to shawls and, possibly, continue with my other 2010 goal of
knitting sweaters with all the neck shapings in EZ’s Knitting Workshop.I’m hoping that we have a cool
September so I can embark my project of the year:Alice Starmore’s Oregon Cardigan.And after finishing some two-color stranded sweaters (Laela
and Sirdal) and one woven-in sweater (Philosopher’s Wool’s Colour Your Own), I
should know what I’m doing (mostly).

I spent the last couple of weeks in March balling up the
Philosopher’s Wool yarn (which is beautiful) in preparation for the KAL start
date of April 1.That sweater is
now officially “on the needles,” as I cast on last night for the sleeve.The pattern recommends starting with
the sleeves as a way to check your gauge and to be sure you have the same
colors in the same order on both—sound advice, and I decided to follow it.

But before casting on, I took the time to make some large
swatches.And this exercise
resulted in some surprising results:

I really like how the weaving in looks in this yarn far
better than the stranding.The
stranded swatch is on top, and it produces a smooth fabric.But the colors seem to blend in and
they don’t look nearly as good to my eye as the woven-in sample
underneath.The woven-in swatch
gives the knitting some texture that adds to the rustic feel of this minimally
processed yarn.The colors pop, no
matter which hand I hold them in. And so for this sweater I will be weaving-in
as I change colors.

The difference between the two methods is clearer from a
look at the wrong side of each swatch:

The woven-in swatch gives a slightly denser, squooshier
fabric—and it will be a very warm sweater.I’ll probably wear it as a substitute for a light
jacket—ideally as my Rhinebeck sweater.

November 13, 2009

The failure of my plan to knit twelve sweaters in 2009 has
not daunted me from making similarly grandiose plans for 2010.I do intend to finish Thora (the fourth
of my 2009 sweaters) and to reevaluate my WIPs, but I’d decided to depart from
my usual style of one-color, cable or lace sweaters, knit in pieces to tackle
new things.In fact, 2010 will be
“the year of the new” (although if the summer is miserably hot, it may be time
for a lace shawl again).

This will be my foray into stranded sweater knitting.One thing that’s prompting this huge
change in my one-color, knitted-flat-with-seams sweaters is the prospect of
knitting an Alice Starmore sweater.DH and DS got it for me for mother’s day (yes, mother’s day in 2009),
and I knew it would never be one of twelve knit this year.I have been staring at the yarn
longingly since it arrived because the colors are so beautiful.

This is the Oregon Cardigan (in Autumn), which was also
featured in VK, Holiday 2007 and is available from Virtual Yarns.

I’m not that much of a knitting fool to think I can manage
this as my first stranded project, and so I have decided to gradually ease up
to the challenge.I’ve had 20
balls of brick red Heilo in my stash for at least 10 years, which was intended
for a project that I abandoned after swatching.My swatch for this sweater, that looks so lovely in the
picture, lacks the stitch definition shown in the picture (in fact, it looks like crap).

I bought the Heilo when Patternworks was still in
Poughkeepsie and had the most fantastic after-Christmas sales—40% off on almost
everything, as I recall.So the
yarn was very inexpensive for me.(I still dream about those sales and walking through the warehouse of
metal racks filled with yarn.)

So the 20 balls languished until I discovered Sirdal one
late night while ogling the color sweaters on Ravelry.

Sometime in late spring, I bought the
Dale of Norway book that has the instructions and saw that all I needed was the contrast yarn.So in preparation for starting it, I bought the
necessary skeins of Heilo in natural.

I also decided to work very traditionally on my first color sweater (no modifications except needed gauge changes), and when I
discovered there were pewter Sirdal buttons, I added them to my order from Woolybaabaa
(excellent service, and a great selection of Scandinavian yarns and projects).

I also don’t think that my experience with Sirdal will be
enough to give me confidence for the Alice Starmore project, and so I’m going
to tackle another stranded kit in my stash before that.This will give me practice using more
colors and reinforce what I’ve learned working with Sirdal. The second stranded sweater is from a Philosopher's Wool kit (the Design Your Own Sweater), which I will try to adapt
a bit so it isn’t quite so billowy.

I’ll be knitting Sirdal as part of a Ravelry KAL, Knit a
Norwegian, and I have until January 1 to get started.So I’ll be swatching to decide what needles to use, studying
the pattern, and doing background reading on stranded knitting. The first step is to figure out how to get the dominant color.